We Hi friends. I wanted to share the following feedback that I sent to Apple accessibility . I would welcome your perspectives on the matter and also any suggestions as to how to get this matter to the right people. Thank you!
Text of the email follows…
Hello. I am a long time Apple user who has a visual impairment and also a repetitive stress injury. In consequence, I use both VoiceOver and voice control on my iPhone and MacBook Pro.
My strong complaint as with the speech recognition accuracy for dictating text with voice control. Issuing commands to the iPhone through voice control works quite well. But open speech dictation is terrible and only seems to have gotten worse over the past few years (by my personal subjective opinion and also according to a number of other people I have spoken with). This leads to a profound limitation in how useful my iPhone is for me and for anyone else who wants to talk into their phone and have it talk back to them. Whenever I dictate an email like this or a text message, I have to prove and edit it to make sure it is readable. I have to fix many mistakes. I don't even bother trying to dictate longer documents.
As a general matter, I find the iPhone much simpler to use than a desktop computer as a screen reader user. But the poor accuracy on the iPhone complicates matters. Recently I purchased dragon NaturallySpeaking for PC and I use this for dictating longer documents. The accuracy is amazing. But I would still prefer to do things like emails and texts on the iPhone because it is so much simpler.
I am quite sure that I am not the only person with or without a disability who would like to be able to type reasonably accurately by voice on the iPhone, not to mention a Mac. Apple has done such a fabulous job on so many accessibility fronts, so why is it that speech recognition is so lame? I would strongly encourage Apple to put some serious work into this area, and as much as it would increase accessibility and productivity for many people.
Thank you for your consideration.
Metta (with friendliness),
Scott Feldman, PhD
Comments
I’m not going crazy
By the way, I’m dictating this. But I will probably have to go back and make a few changes. It is shocking! Has always been bad, but I think it is deteriorating. I don’t know whether it is accent specific as well. I thought it may have been struggling with an Australian accent. I do love it though when it does insert expletives that you never said in to a sentence. You just have to be careful you check it before you sent the message to your boss… I’ve never been able to get the hang of braille screen input, and typing is just so so slow on the phone keyboard, so dictation is really the only option when you are on the go. Just Siri is bad as well. You know, if you ask Siri to find you the phone number of a certain business name. The one that gets me a lot is that it seems to get they and I mixed up. And don’t tell me why ethics comes out as Fracture. And just so you know, I had to correct that because the last sentence just came out I don’t know why fx he’s coming out of the fraction.
I agree! And I think it's the new iOS
The second I downloaded iOS 26.3.1 (23D8133) on my iPhone SE, voice control became total trash. The errors are truly inscrutable –for example, it tried to put "find" When I said "on" in the previous sentence. It's never done a simple parenthetical for me without making an insane mistake, like writing out the word parentheses for one of them but not the other. Capitalization and spacing is crazy, which it never was before. It’s a huge disappointment, given how much I rely on it. It *has* to be AI.
Maybe related(?), Google translate(EN-ES) got worse at some point over the few years. It make such dumb mistakes (my opinion), it can be a joke like it was 15 years ago. I bet they're both testing garbage alpha AI on users.
Also they got rid of the simple option to add vocabulary without making an uploading a whole document. It would at least be a Band-Aid solution for some problems to teach it the words it doesn't know.
Oh, it's not just OS 26...
I am on an iPhone SE 2022, running iOS 18.7.7. Dictation is hit or miss at the best of times. I don't think dictation has been, decent, since perhaps iOS 14, if not earlier. 🤷♂️
iOS 27
I think iOS 26.4.2 fix dictation. Maybe in iOS 27?it could happen!!!! Could it be a miracle! LLC.
It's not getting worse for me
Hi. I have my iPhone 15 pro with IOS 18.7.7 set to learn to improve accuracy while transcribing my dictation. When it makes a mistake, if I correct the mistake, it makes that same mistake much less often. Many if not most of the old mistakes aren't being made any more. The trick is to have the phone set to learn, and to be sure to make corrections. The phone will remember. Mine does, anyway.